Federal and State Tax law has become so complex that it is now estimated that each year Americans alone use over 6 billion personal hours, and spend nearly 4 billion dollars, in an effort to comply with Federal and State Tax statutes. Given this level of complexity and cost, it is not surprising that more and more taxpayers find it necessary to obtain help, in one form or another, to prepare their taxes. Tax return preparation systems, such as tax return preparation software programs and applications, represent a potentially flexible, highly accessible, and affordable source of tax preparation assistance. However, traditional tax return preparation systems are, by design, fairly generic in nature and often lack the malleability to meet the specific needs of a given user.
For instance, traditional tax return preparation systems have employed generic techniques for answering questions from potential customers regarding the tax return preparation process. If a user submits a query regarding, for example, deductions, traditional tax return preparations systems provide rules or instructions that cause the user to have to invest additional time to determine the answer to his/her question. The traditional tax return systems regurgitate tax law that states the various criteria needed to qualify for one or more particular deductions, and leaves the analysis of the user's personal information to the user. In other words, the onus was on the potential customer to reflect on their financial state, the status of their tax return, and the tax rules to determine the answer to their question.
The impersonal techniques employed by traditional electronic tax return preparation systems result in losses of significant numbers of potential customers each year because the tax return preparation systems appear to inadequately answer the potential customers' questions. As a result, the service providers of the traditional tax return preparation systems lose both the dissatisfied potential customers, in addition to losing potential referrals that may have originated from a satisfactory experience for the lost potential customers.
What is needed is a method and system for providing personalized responses to questions received from a user of an electronic tax return preparation system.